Cooler Heads Should Prevail

What if global warming isn't a threat? What if manmade greenhouse gases have little effect on temperatures? What if the slight temperature increase over 150 years is normal, not the path to global catastrophe?

Would we consider massive transformation of our fossil-fuel-based economy to a windmill- and sunshine-powered economy? Would nations gather to divvy up prosperous countries' wealth to dole it out to the less-prosperous nations?

We don't think so. This week in Copenhagen, Denmark, 192 nations convene to consider binding agreements to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to redistribute developed nations' wealth so developing countries can afford to give up their reliance on cheap fossil-fuel-based energy.

But thousands of previously secret e-mails and documents at the U.K.'s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit complicate the agenda. The recently leaked documents — dubbed Climategate — appear to reveal a pattern of data manipulation and destruction, plots to deny Freedom of Information requests for that data and an uncertainty about the data that these climate scientists publicly claimed to be beyond doubt.

At the least, Climategate raises serious questions about the integrity and accuracy of data, and the resulting computer models used to justify capping greenhouse gases.

"At worst, it's junk science and it's part of a massive international scientific fraud," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican who called for an investigation. "(A)s policymakers who are making decisions about the state of the American economy for the next several generations, we ought to have accurate science."

Whatever you feel about global warming, Climategate is a huge red flag. The stampede to remaking economies, subsidizing nations and redistributing wealth must stop long enough for a thorough, impartial and entirely above-board examination of the evidence. All the evidence.

CRU's top scientist, Phil Jones, has stepped aside while the university prepares to investigate the content of thousands of e-mails, data and documents, and the research itself, according to Associated Press reports. Jones' collaborator in global warming zealotry, Michael Mann, similarly will be scrutinized by his employer, Pennsylvania State University. Mann already bares the distinction of authoring the notorious "hockey stick" temperature chart that concealed past high temperatures, giving the impression recent temperatures are unusual.

Congressional Republicans demand an investigation.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Chris Horner is calling for NASA's global warming data to be released, too, which the agency has refused to do for two years, despite Freedom of Information requests. "I assume what is there is highly damaging," Horner said. NASA also compiles and analyzes temperature readings used by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to forecast alarming warming.

The leaked e-mails reveal uncertainty by CRU's own climate scientists about their data, despite publicly claiming it to be irrefutable, which prompted New York Times columnist John Tierney to write: "These researchers ... seem so focused on winning the public relations war that they exaggerate their certitude."

The theory of manmade catastrophic global warming is predicated on data now highly in question, but also on connecting dots. It's less than 1-degree warmer than 157 years ago. That pales compared with increases over previous centuries when temperatures rose 4 and 5 degrees. We are emerging from the Little Ice Age, which means warming is perfectly normal, greenhouse gases or not.

Greenhouse gas emissions have increased substantially, but even so, historically, have been considerably higher, long before SUVs and fossil-fuel-powered energy plants. There's only a theoretical connection between those emissions and higher temperatures. As greenhouse gases soared in the past decade, global temperatures declined, the opposite of what models predict.

At the very least, concluding that manmade greenhouse gases doom us to unbearably high temperatures is unproved, and far from universally accepted, despite contentions of scientists like Jones and Mann.

Even President Barack Obama's global warming point man, John Holdren, conceded that if the e-mails reveal inappropriate data manipulation that ended up in official reports, obviously those reports would need to be corrected.

It's only prudent to stop the global warming rush and reassess the assumptions that set it in motion. If data have been cooked, manipulated, improperly calculated or flat out fabricated, we need to know — certainly before drastically converting from the least expensive energy to the least feasible energy. And certainly before redistributing American wealth.

Copenhagen is likely to reach no binding agreement, but not because of the scientific questions being raised. A paltry temperature increase — if even that is true — won't persuade Saudi Arabia, Russia or China to stop extracting oil and coal reserves and selling them profitably for decades to come. Why should we?

REPRINTED FROM THE NEW BERN SUN JOURNAL.

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